I've just finished the first season of Barry. Despite ostensibly being a half-hour comedy, the show that I'm finding a desire to compare it with is Breaking Bad. I realize that might appear to be unfair to Barry, given that Breaking Bad has gone down as one of the best TV shows of all time, but I don't actually mean to say Barry compares poorly to it. Barry is doing similar things - a criminal character balancing their violent life with a mundane one - in opposite ways.
The premise: Barry is about the eponymous hit man (Bill Hader), a veteran of Afghanistan who has been working for a man named Fuches (Stephen Root), a friend of his (presumably deceased) father's who effectively acts as his agent, taking a 50% cut as he sells Barry's services to various people willing to pay.
Barry is sent on a job to Los Angeles to kill the guy who is fucking a Chechen gang leader's wife, but in tracking the guy, he comes across an acting class taught by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) and, like so many who come to Hollywood, is entranced by the idea of acting. He meets Sally (Sarah Goldberg), one of the students in the class, and becomes invested in the idea of redefining himself, becoming an actor, and quitting his violent professional life.
Tonally, the show begins by milking the comedy out of such a premise, with jokes about the vapidity of Hollywood and a number of bizarre figures in the world of crime (NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), one of the Chechens, is a stand-out the way he embodies a dopey, ultra-friendly face to the banality of evil.)
But even as we watch Barry, who is convinced that he is a good guy who kills bad guys, and that he's not fundamentally evil, grapple with his struggles to quit this life, we're invited to question both whether that's actually true and also whether Barry actually deserves redemption.
While Breaking Bad revealed relatively early that Walter White was a bad man looking for an excuse to do bad things, Barry clearly sees himself as someone who should and will at one point be able to life the life he feels is his destiny - to simply be an ex-Marine who served his country faithfully, and who now is settling into a happy life as a successful actor with his girlfriend Sally.
He's a man who wants redemption, but at the same time he's in denial about the monstrous things he has done. We like Barry - we see his goals and desires, and if it were any other person, we'd feel no conflict in sympathizing. But redemption requires acknowledging the problem. Barry wants to escape this violent world with his soul unscathed, but it's already scarred over.
Spoilers coming up.
I remember thinking that the penultimate episode felt like too many beats at once. After Barry reaches out to an old Marine friend named Chris at Sally's prompting, Chris introduces him to another marine named Taylor who discovers his criminal work and decides, in an act of testosterone-fueled idiocy, to join in.
Fuches tells Barry to kill him once the job is done, but Barry can't bring himself to kill a fellow marine. Taking Taylor on another job, Taylor ropes in Chris and another marine, and very promptly gets himself killed. Chris is forced to kill someone to save Barry, but when Chris can't handle the trauma of having done so (he was a Marine, but never saw combat,) Barry realizes that the only way to keep Chris from turning himself in and getting Barry caught is to kill Chris.
The moment is painful, as we see Barry has done nothing but bring death to this former friend. His profound guilt over doing the deed actually winds up allowing him to play a single-line Shakespeare role opposite Sally ("My Lord, the Queen is dead,") with overflowing sadness and pain, and ironically this earns him respect as an actor and Sally's renewed interest in him as a romantic partner.
Things wrap up remarkably cleanly, as the cops totally misinterpret all the information they've gathered and thus leave Barry free.
So then we cut to a few months later. Barry and Sally are a couple, putting on a play together, and staying at a cabin Gene has (not sure how he can afford that, but maybe that'll come up later) where Gene is also hosting Janice Moss (Paula Newsome) who happens to be the detective that so incorrectly tied up the story.
Barry seems great, well-adjusted, and happy. But one unfortunate anecdote reminds Janice of the case, and she looks into it, finally realizing Barry's role in all of this. Despite all the performance, all the guilt-motivated things he has done, like apparently founding a charity to prevent suicides among veterans - like the suicide he faked for Chris - Barry is still fundamentally not willing to pay for what he has done. He wants it over, he wants out, he wants that part of his life to just go away.
But he isn't willing to pay. He'd rather commit murder.
He might be likable. He might be relatable. But he is not a good person.
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